“The War is Going to Ignite”: On the Anticipation of Violence in Lebanon

November 2012 Page 327

Sami HermezUniversity of Pittsburgh

“The War is Going to Ignite”: On the Anticipation of Violencein Lebanon

In this article, I elaborate on the constant anticipation of violence that runs deepwithin society in Lebanon. My objective is to think of the mundane locations ofviolence, and how we come to live the violence in and through ordinary times; mymotivation here is to inquire into the different ways people experience war and itsaftermath. I also explore the ways that violence is present and implicated in theordinary rather than the two being mutually exclusive. The anticipation of violencebecomes a way to think through regular mundane encounters of everyday life instates with protracted conflict. I analyze this anticipation of violence by looking atselect ethnographic encounters from my fieldwork, and specifically during a time ofsporadic bombings over several months in 2007. [Anticipation of violence, protractedconflict, war, Lebanon, Middle East, everyday life]

“Sami, awlak rah. yisır f ı h. arb?” (Sami, do you think there will be a war?).1 Ahmed,2 amarried man in his thirties, with two kids at the time of this writing, would sometimesask me this question as I walked into a cafe where he worked as a waiter, in the Beirutneighborhood of Hamra. I would spend several hours a day in cafes such as this one,especially during the early days of fieldwork when I had no Internet at home or duringBeirut’s regular power outages because my apartment building did not have a backupelectric generator. This particular cafe was small and often quiet, which allowed meto chat with Ahmed and to develop friendly relations with him, as there were usuallyno more than two or three other customers.

On days when Ahmed asked me the above question, he would do this rhetorically afterhearing the day’s news. The question came almost immediately after our greetingsand after he’d handed me a menu; when he was this blunt, it was usually followedwith a smile or giggle, as though he were being playful rather than fearful. SometimesI would try to answer; other times I would dismiss the question for what it was: asignal to start a conversation and a way to bond between two people who did not knoweach other very well. The question opened the door to allow me to ask him abouthis day or to engage with him in a political analysis of the present. With Ahmed, theconversation would sometimes move from current events to discussions of his future,including whether he should find work in Dubai before a war breaks out.3 I could dolittle to comfort him, as we both entertained the idea of the inevitable beginning of awar, its contours variably defined, and that it was a matter of when, not if, it would

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 35, Number 2, pps. 327–344. ISSN1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C© 2012 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2012.01206.x.

PoLAR: Vol. 35, No. 2

begin. Yet anticipating war verbally through his question and implicitly in discussionsof his future plans, and turning the political situation into grounds for developing asocial bond, seemed to be devices at Ahmed’s disposal to establish some level ofcertainty amid the possibility of future violence; a possibility which in turn was thecause of his uncertainty.

In this article, I elaborate on the constant anticipation of violence that runs deepwithin society in Lebanon, causing people like Ahmed to nonchalantly ask if Ithought there would be a war. My analysis stems from dissertation research that Iconducted in Lebanon between 2006–09, which involved ethnographic work withformer militia fighters, political activists, family members, and society at large. Ianalyze this anticipation of violence by looking at a few ethnographic encounters thatoccurred over several months in 2007.

My goal is to think about how society experiences the mundane locations of violenceand how people come to live violent and ordinary times as they overlap. This lineof inquiry is meant to shed light on life in protracted conflict and on the differentways people experience war and its aftermath. To this end, I begin by exploring thetemporal dimensions of anticipating violence in a zone of conflict. I suggest thatwe understand these practices as moving elusively in duration rather than confinethem to and interpret them in a specific moment in time. Furthermore, I elaborate onethnographic encounters where this anticipation manifests itself intersubjectively inpeople’s everyday lives. In doing so, I expand on the relation between certainty anduncertainty that I observed with Ahmed. I propose that forms of violence are presentand implicated in the seemingly ordinary, which reverses, yet supplements, TobiasKelly’s argument that the ordinary can be constituted within violence, and I build onhis point that violence and what we think of as the ordinary are not mutually exclusiveor opposite (Kelly 2008:353). Kelly argues that during the second intifada in Palestinethere were many ordinary moments, such as watching TV or preparing food, withinsupposedly violent times, whereas I analyze how in Lebanon such moments canthemselves be inflected with a form of violence. Similar to Kelly, instead of lookingat extraordinary experiences, I address the ordinary, not as an abstract notion, butas an experience that I explore ethnographically through what I take to be mundaneeveryday contexts, and specifically in this article, through a mother’s advice to herchild, a meeting among neighbors, and a traversal of the city.

While Kelly examines violence and the ordinary within Palestinian society amidmilitary occupation, my exploration of the anticipation of violence takes place withina different context: in the wake of a war in Lebanon that took place between 1975and 1990. This was a war that was characterized by a heterogeneous experience ofintercommunal and external dimensions, and which took place for a variety of reasons.One of these was the redistribution of power and economic resources primarilybetween the largest of Lebanon’s 18 sects. Another contributing factor to the unfoldingof the war was the conflict over Palestinian statehood, a conflict that involved Israel,Syria, and other nations as primary actors (Traboulsi 2007).

The 1989 Taef Accord, seen as the agreement that ended the war, did not resolve thewar’s causes, and the country remained in a precarious situation in the following years.

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The war culminated in a general amnesty that allowed warlords to gain political powerand legitimacy while neglecting the rights of victims. People who “disappeared”during the war remained unaccounted for, Israel continued to occupy large tracts ofSouthern Lebanon, and Syria controlled the country with the tacit acceptance of alarge segment of the Lebanese political elite. Although economic and constructionbooms were promised, the years following the war also saw Israeli interventionsin the country, violent crackdowns against anti-Syrian activists, several bombingswhose assailants escaped with impunity, and the threat of escalating confrontationsin Lebanon between Israel and Syria.

I began preliminary fieldwork in unsettling times, after the assassination of formerPrime Minister Rafiq Hariri on February 14, 2005, and returned for fulltime field-work during the July 2006 war that Israel waged against Hizballah in Lebanon.The years before and after the 2006 war witnessed a series of assassinations andbombings associated with the pursuit of an international tribunal to investigate theHariri assassination. In the summer of 2007, there was another war, this time wagedby the Lebanese military against the militant group known as Fateh el-Islam (Con-quest of Islam) in the Palestinian camp of Nahr el-bared, forcing 30 to 40 thousandPalestinian refugees living in the camp to be further displaced. In May 2008, armedconflict erupted once again between Lebanese factions vying for political power.4

Additionally, for 18 months during my fieldwork, the country did not have a presi-dent, which resulted in the almost-constant speculation on the nature of the comingviolence.

It was from this context of varying degrees of political violence, along with a recenthistory of unresolved conflict, that I felt the anticipation of violence took on deepsignificance for those around me, including myself. A large number of short films anddocumentaries about the various wars further attested to the way war preoccupiedpeople’s lives and tried to bridge the past with phenomenological experiences ofthe present (Abi Samra 2010; El Chamaa 2009). A variety of books about wartimeevents (Hage 2007; Saadeh 2005; Sayigh 2008) and fictional films, among themUnder the Bombs (Aractingi 2007) and The Mountain (Salhab 2010), also ensuredthat experiences of the wars were constantly remembered. This is in addition to thewar-torn landscape of the country that presented a daily reminder of the war years.

I wanted to analyze the feelings and motivations behind such phrases like Al-h. arb jaye (the war is coming) or rah. tula’ el-h. arb (the war is going to ignite)that I often heard in the form of questions or declarations. This type of anticipationopens a window into seeing the world as a space of ordinary moments inflected withforms of violence, and conversely, of such forms of violence containing the ordinary.It allowed me to reflect on the influence of states, political parties, sects, or commu-nal leaders in everyday life, as their actions and policies manipulate people’s fearsand thoughts of future violence. Media reports and press statements by politiciansalso had significant roles and were replete with talk of war in the years prior to andduring my fieldwork. While all this talk was of how war would not be likely, onemight expect that if the situation were calm (e.g., in Boston, MA), one would nothear politicians talk about how there will be no war, for the lack of war would be aforegone conclusion.


For one interlocutor, the frequency of this language—that there will be no war—hadthe opposite effect, signaling uncertainty and danger to come. Politicians also warnedthat a war could ignite if the country continued on a certain path. Walid Jumblat,head of the Socialist party and one of the leading figures of the Druze community,announced to his supporters on television: “If they want war, we welcome theirwar.”5 Such discourse circulates through time and space, and when deployed by thesame figures who control the means of violence (and the main media outlets, forthe most part), it can be seen as a method of keeping violence on people’s mindsand as an attempt to coerce social perceptions of the future. Conscious or not, it is away for political elites to frame issues of security and stability. If levels of fear andanticipation of the coming war remain prevalent, people may continue to feel thattheir leaders are necessary for their sense of communal security within a constantlyunstable state headed for violence. A mere possibility of war—any war—means thatone must tread carefully in calling for accountability, lest silm al-ahlı (civil peace)be put in danger by the very players who, incidentally, warn of that impendingdanger.

These maneuvers by political elites, and other actors at the macro level, seep intoeveryday contexts and into ways of being. Through people’s experiences and themundane ethnographic encounters I have chosen to describe, I suggest that we maybe able to analyze the meaning of violence as it seeps into these everyday contextsand to explain ways that war becomes an absent presence. This absent presence is onephenomenon that solidifies war as an inescapable component of politics, undergirdingpolitical life for people in Lebanon. It suggests a recollection of past violence andan imagination of future violence. Whereas the physicality and perpetration of war isoften absent, talking of war; imagining it; sensing it; being tense and frustrated by it;feeling despair, resignation, fear, and hope by it; this is how war remains constantlypresent as a structuring force in social life.

Al-h. arb (war), in a sense, and as seen here, is perhaps more a metaphor for uncertaintyrather than having a monolithic definition or bounded meaning. An understandingof war, then, becomes differentiated by the various ways people experience it andanticipate it. A coming war can refer to a war with Syria or Israel or internallybetween Lebanese political factions, and the conflagration of such a war can itself beperceived variably. In fact, war need not begin in Lebanon for it to become present.People also spend time anticipating how war in other parts of the region, and howAmerica’s wars in the world, may spill over into their daily lives in violent ways. Theanticipation is not unique to this field site, but what does stand out are the ways it ismanifested and practiced, and what elements are anticipated and why.

Before continuing, however, it must be noted that anticipation, in a general sense, is adeeply rooted phenomenon that guides social behavior not just in regards to violence.It is a practice, as Pradeep Jeganathan writes, that is not “confined to the verbal or theexplicit domain of life” but encompasses “a range of ways of being, both subtle andsharp, muted and strong that are both spoken and unspoken, explicit and implicit”(1997:185). The way violence is anticipated, and the meaning this anticipation lendsto social life, is constantly changing as people’s feelings of anticipation connect


dialectically with other people, situations, and objects around them. How we cometo anticipate violence can then be described, but always only partially.

I argue that anticipation is a necessary condition of social interaction, and it pro-vides insight into how we imbue history and the future with meaning (as in we liveour lives constantly thinking of the future and what it might bring, and anticipatedevelopments in our work, in our relationships, and in the surprises each new daymight produce). Since I claim we are always living in anticipation, it is specificallywhat is anticipated—in this case, forms of violence—and how it is anticipated thatmakes this discussion significant. There are different scenarios that breed multipleways of anticipating violence, and a range of possibilities among people faced withsimilar circumstances. I suggest that this range, to a large degree, is determined byvarying recollections and perceptions of the past and by the very political interestsand outlooks of the people involved, which complicate attempts to confine processesof anticipation.

Specifically, the anticipation of violence can be seen as an intersubjective moment; itis a way for people in Lebanon to relate to themselves, to others in society, and to theinstitutions around them. Under the pressure of social divisions, whether sectarian,political, or economic, this intersubjective space may offer alternatives for new formsof connection and relationality, and for meaning making in a diverse and seeminglydivided national arena. The anticipation of violence, then, as I show, becomes a wayto think through regular mundane contexts of everyday life and, more ambitiously, tothink about new possibilities for social relations, connections, and solidarities bothin Lebanon and, perhaps more broadly, in states with protracted violent conflict.

Time and the Anticipation of Violence

On a regular Saturday afternoon in mid-November 2007, a quiet day in my relative’shome overlooking the city, I am in the TV room with Rola and her son Elie. Rola isa housewife and a mother of three children and has nine siblings. She is originallyfrom the north, where her family still owns a small tract of land, but they movedto the Greater Beirut area in the mid-20th century. She lived in Lebanon throughoutLebanon’s war from 1975–90 and is now a strong supporter of the Free PatrioticMovement (FPM).6 Since she is married, she no longer votes in her home villagebecause, by law, she must vote in her husband’s district. Had it been otherwise, shewould have supported Suleiman Franjieh,7 at least during elections, as her family istraditionally indebted to him through a patron–client relationship. Elie is a collegestudent studying engineering, and while he has no formal political affiliation, he isrooted in Christian identity politics.

As Elie and I are about to head out of the house in separate directions, a conversationbegins between the three of us about the political situation and its ramifications. Thatnight I write these observations in my notes:

Rola warns us before we go out that this week is supposed to be bad. Thenshe laughs and says, “This week is every week.” We giggle; a giggle thatbetrays uneasiness. Elie joins in and says, “We are always saying this, but


who ever listens to the warnings? We end up doing what we want to doanyway. This is our life!” We all agree. Every week is the week the war issupposed to begin or some conflict is supposed to explode. [Fieldnotes,November 2007]

But war does not begin, and conflict only rarely explodes.

Rola’s grave warnings about the imminence of war were at that moment guided byher reading of the present situation and its politics. She was not simply referencingsome abstract phenomenon of war; she was being informed by a past war that she hadlived through, and which her son and I, for the most part, had not experienced. Thepast, very clearly remembered, meant that Rola was, among other things, thinking ofGreen Lines (ceasefire lines that divide cities) and of killings at checkpoints based onidentity cards. It meant that she was thinking of religion inscribed in neighborhoodsto map her zones of safety. In this way, it also meant that she was thinking of thedivisions of East and West Beirut of the ’70s and ’80s and the anxiety about crossingover from one side to the other. It was this crossing over—as well as our staying outlate into the night when battles are perceived to take place—that she was implicitlywarning us about.

People have a repertoire of learned practices that they use in different places andtimes, and here, one could observe in the slightest warning to Elie and me how Rolacarried her experiences from decades ago to our present, making them habitual andessentially timeless. In Lebanon, practices are transferred when society moves awayfrom a period it defines as war toward moments it defines in relative opposition tothis war period (I call these moments “not-war”). The ways of using the space ofnot-war borrow from, and remain linked to, the learned practices from the periodof war before it. This borrowing and transfer of past practices ensures that theseperiods of war and not-war (commonly referred to as peacetime) interlope and merge,forming a continuity; but they do not reduce into each other, rather they overlap andfuse in ways that often escape easy categorization, dichotomization, and definition.8

Thus, part of living in and interacting with the not-war period is to occupy timewith moments of anticipation, with thoughts of the future that reflect back on veryreal past events, and with the retelling of narratives of these events. Past practicesend up working ambiguously as people try to rely on and remember the past forpurposes of survival in the present. These past practices assist people in determininga level of certainty by informing their anticipation. However, they do not banishuncertainty.

Time, especially as related to future and past wars, is particularly important to thisdiscussion. Time, in the Bergsonian sense, is a duration that cannot be captured(Bergson 1946). An anticipation of violence can be understood within this ceaselesstime as part of a duration that is constantly excavating past violence, so that what isotherwise thought of as an event in the past is never really part of the past, nor isit an event with a clear end or beginning. The past and present converge in Rola’swarning, a warning informed by a previous bombing, as if that past bombing were stillsending shock waves into the present, and as if it had a social life of its own toweringover our daily lives like a shadow or foreboding character, making appearances in


newspaper articles, political speeches, and countless other sites. The past collideswith the present in how an old war determines Rola’s warnings to her son and meabout traversing in and between the old divisions of Beirut, between its supposedlyChristian East and Muslim West; categories that are no longer fixed and delineatedin the way that they may have been in the past.

One of the determinations of people who anticipate violence is to seek meaning andfixity in the world by attempting to predict and know the future; they are not alwayssuccessful. Much like trying to imagine what you will accomplish tomorrow, youmight imagine the motions, but, as Bergson tells us, what you will think and feel inthis future time “you can know nothing of today, because your state tomorrow willinclude all the life you will have lived up until that moment” (Bergson 1946:19). Onemight imagine the “external shape” of an event, but trying to capture it in full willonly lead one through a “duration” to the actual event, at which point there would“no longer be any question of foreseeing it” (19). As Bergson claims, duration is aplace where things are revealed.

Anticipation can be a means to predetermine, or reveal, the outcome of an occurrenceat some future time; in this way, duration presupposes anticipation. Bergson suggeststhat with perception and witnessing, one can come to gain absolute knowledge byusing one’s intuition stretched over a specific period. Phenomenologists argue thatabsolute knowledge is inconceivable and that, at best, it is only a relative perceptionthat one can hope to gain of a subject. Whether one agrees with Bergson or not, itis safe to say that through perception, and through what one has witnessed, a personcomes to know something. Since the future is unknowable in the present, peoplecannot comprehensively know the exact contours of the unknown. Yet, throughanticipation, people can act as though they know, because anticipation can be thoughtof as bridging the anxious gap between perception and truthful or certain knowledge,and between what people perceive in any given present and the certain knowledge ofthe future revealed in duration and the flow of time.

Most people know beforehand that life is never fully predictable, yet they continue toattempt to gain complete knowledge of the future through processes of anticipation.Anticipation is what is meant to deliver them to certain knowledge, and to what isthen revealed in duration. However, this anticipation, despite its effort at certainty,is never in fact certain; therefore, ensuring knowledge remains relative rather thanabsolute. In a sense, people in Lebanon are not located in the duration where thingsare revealed so much as they linger in states of anticipation that attempt to formcontinuity in what would otherwise feel like disruptions of the before and after.These disruptions, however, persist and do not magically disappear. This process ofanticipation—the way people practice it in the present in order to bring the past to thefuture—and the knowledge this anticipation of violence produces can be thought ofas a form of memory that generates meaning for people in the present. Importantly,the anticipation of violence can provide a useful technique to inject certainty into theuncertainty infused in daily life in Lebanon. The future moment of violence, partlyexcavated from the past, can then serve as an experience of certainty bounded withuncertainty, the two fused together and knitted in time.


Yet the uncertainty that accompanies most anticipation ensures that no matter howprepared people try to be based on a past repertoire of learned practices, they willbe presented with surprises that will reveal themselves, not necessarily as rupture(Taussig 1992) but as a continuation and extension of everyday life. For example, inRola’s imagination, the checkpoint is associated with certain practices and fixes iden-tities in specific ways. However, the notion of the checkpoint and its associations canalso reveal themselves differently and multifariously. For example, an armed fighterat a checkpoint at the present moment may be searching for a mix of different iden-tities, so the tactics Rola learned, based on past wartime experiences at checkpoints,may not be useful anymore. If she were to encounter this checkpoint, the newnessmay not present itself necessarily as rupture but, rather, would be incorporated into apresent that she would be forced to rethink.

This concept is further illustrated by events that took place on January 25, 2007,when fighting erupted between students at the Arab University of Beirut. Accordingto the news on TV, snipers entrenched themselves on rooftops, and checkpoints wereerected where people were asked for their identity cards and discriminated againstbased on sectarian allegiances. But identity cards no longer have a person’s religionmarked on them, and the crisis was clearly not one based on religion but on politicalgrievances, revealing a disconnect between the purpose of the checkpoint and whatthe armed fighters were searching for. I learned in conversations later that people weresupposedly wrongfully harmed, but I found that those around me saw the surprisingepisode as folded into everyday life rather than as a rupture.

The January 2007 episode also highlights how the experiences of past wars—theway they are narrated and the stories that enter our consciousness—provide the basisfor some of the techniques of war. In general, recollections of past wars, such asRola’s recollection of checkpoint practices, can enable techniques of future wars. Ifforgetting were so common and possible, then the technologies of war would not be soimmediately remembered and executed. By technologies I do not mean the weaponsthemselves but the way war is fought and lived everyday: the tactics, strategies, andmaneuvers (such as by fighters who think in terms of past intercity divisions or bycivilians who know to hide in their bathrooms when a battle begins). Bodily andspatial techniques that are learned in the past are oftentimes transmitted and reused,as are discourses, which makes it easy, in the case of Lebanon, to revert to sectarianthinking. In this way, social traditions are carried forward through techniques (Mauss2006). The anticipation of violence thus becomes part of social traditions because ofongoing and sustained political conflicts.

Everyday Encounters of the Anticipation of Violence

The anticipation of violence manifests in various encounters of everyday life, aseverywhere the talk of war seeps into daily conversations and decisions. One nightin early November 2007, I met with my neighbors to discuss whether to sell thebuilding’s electric generator and whether to buy a new one. This conversationtook significant importance because state-supplied electricity in the country did notreach people 24 hours each day, and while the area of Ras Beirut received more


electricity than most, it still had 3 hours of outages per day. This forced most resi-dents either to purchase generator memberships with neighborhood electricity dealersor to buy their own building generator. My neighbors were of various backgrounds,Lebanese, Palestinian, Greek Orthodox, Sunni, and Druze, and were supporters ofvarious parties across the political spectrum. Among their professions were univer-sity professors, doctors, and UN staff, and they were middle- to upper-middle-classfamilies.

In the midst of the conversation about generators, one neighbor said that there wasno point in buying a new generator because war is coming and there will, in anycase, be no mazut (diesel); Israel’s siege tactics of h. arb tammuz (the July 2006 war),which made gas scarce, informed this position. Another neighbor countered: “Weneed a generator because if there is a war then they might cut the electricity evenmore than the current 3 hours each day.” She said that while prices would go up, therewould still be mazut. I agreed, speculating that in the coming war most likely therewould not be a siege on the country like in the summer of 2006, so we would stillbe able to purchase gas. The discussion continued on the timeframe and possibilitiesfor war, punctuated by bursts of laughter as each gave an opinion. The conversationeventually transitioned to neighbors raising the issue that some were not payingtheir quarterly maintenance bills and so there was no use buying a new generatorif bills continued to go unpaid; the neighbors who were not regularly paying werenot present at this meeting. Such poor relations among neighbors when it concernsbuilding maintenance and management are commonplace in many residences aroundthe country. Those that were paying lived on lower floors and said that they were fineduring the power outages. Mostly, the power outages affected elevator usage, or airconditioning and heat, since those three hours were not enough to ruin refrigeratedfood. The meeting concluded with a decision to continue to research generator prices,but no action was taken until a year later when a new one was bought, following afull 12 months without backup electricity.

Just as the mundane afternoon with Rola and Elie led to talk of war, so a nonpoliticalmeeting between a variety of neighbors to deal with residential matters turned intoplanning in case of war. Such conversations often occurred between bursts of gigglesand laughter, and I suggest one reason for this is that people found their thoughtsabsurd. While the possibility of war is very real, and its anticipation is a recognizedsocial fact, it still felt like an absurdity, for the people concerned, when such talk ofwar and taking precautions against it seeped out of an unconscious and implicit realminto the consciousness of daily life; this absurdity often generated laughter. It is onething to anticipate violence, but as soon as it is discussed and becomes conscious, theanticipation turns into a reality, a matter of fact. One could explain this laughter as away in which people react to the absurd notion of their anticipation being realized: itis the laughter of anxiety. Thus, while anticipation of war denotes the possibility andpotential for violence, speaking about violence can give the future an aura of beingreal, certain, and inevitable. Compared to this inevitability, one might think that thestate of anticipation, where certainty meets uncertainty, can actually be a place ofhope: hope against the expectation of violence and hope that the eventuality of whatis anticipated will not be realized (Das 2007:101).


Imbricated Formations of Violence and the Ordinary

In the summer of 2007, the war in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Baredseemed distant to the people in Beirut, and one could easily forget about the tragicdevelopments in the camp. However, life at the Baddawi refugee camp, where mostof the Palestinians went who fled the warzone of Nahr el-bared, also gave way tomundane times when the war took a backseat.9 One forgets that the world can justlinger even during the most brutal practices of humanity. An expression I heard fromone refugee, “We are bored, there is nothing to do,” allowed me to see connectionsbetween my life and his despite the vast differences between boredom in the refugeecamp and that of my sanctuary of Beirut. In Baddawi, I saw people smoking anarguilleh (water pipe) and holding conversations that were not all about the politicalprocesses around them; this should not be surprising, but people who have not livedthrough war or other situations of protracted violence are often astonished by themundane in proximity to violence. In some moments, they spoke about their workor what they did for a living, while other moments were spent in silence. I saw anold man taking an afternoon walk amidst the crowd, and boys just lingering around;playing; bored (see Kelly 2008).

This boredom is not exclusive to the Palestinians in Lebanon. I observed a similarphenomenon during the July 2006 war and at other moments of violence in thecountry. For example, in January 2007, during a riot that shut down the city andincluded burning tires and rock throwing between different political factions, I sawpeople in the streets, in the midst of impending danger, taking a proverbial time-out.Waiting for something to happen, teenagers socialized and set up tables to play cardsat makeshift checkpoints, much like their predecessors who were fighters duringLebanon’s war. All the while, the city and country were shutdown and many fearedfor their lives (see Figure 1).

Kelly tells us that it is a common condition that situations of violence are neverdivorced from the mundane. He writes of the second intifada in Palestine, where heexplores “the meaning and implications of the ordinary and mundane in the midstof armed conflict” (2008:353). He speaks of how “more time is spent watching TV,waiting for buses or preparing food, than it is shooting guns, hiding in basementsor burning houses” (353). For Kelly, the “ordinary does not exist in opposition toviolence, but is deeply implicated within it” (2008:353; see also Das 2007). This is,indeed, what I have shown in the previous example. However, I wish to take Kelly’sargument further, to claim that if the ordinary makes itself known within violence, thenforms of violence also unfold within the ordinary; the two are mutually imbricatedand infused. One can be present in a violent conflict, acting out the ordinary, as Kellyrightfully describes, and, within this ordinary moment, experience violence throughthe anticipation of hostility.

The mutual coexistence of forms of violence and the ordinary can be describedthrough another ethnographic encounter. In mid-June 2007, when the war in Nahrel-Bared was raging on, I was working with Dima, an architect and grassroots activistfrom Triploi but living in Beirut, to provide aid to refugees in the nearby BaddawiPalestinian refugee camp. Dima had lived abroad during her childhood but had also


Figure 1: Picture taken by author at a street blockade during a riot in Beirut,Jan. 23, 2007

experienced significant periods of war between 1975–90. I came to spend many dayswith her during my fieldwork. I found her in her apartment one day, distraught andexpressing frustration about this war and the continual bombings of that summer.As we waited for friends, she told me her fears of people’s determination simply tocontinue their everyday lives. While Kelly tells us that the ordinary life in Palestineis “an aspiration, a desire for a different kind of life” (365), for Dima in Lebanon itwas part of the structures that perpetuated the descent into war:

When the civil war began in 1975, I was not around, I did not seehow it happened. But today, I feel I am watching how a war happens,how a society goes to war. I am seeing how this happens by making asociety more complacent and making it accept things. First, we acceptpolitical assassinations as a way to deal with our problems. So they kill10 people [civilians] to get to one politician, and we say “Haram [Whata pity] the 10 people; allah yirh. amun [God have Mercy on their souls],but the politician was smuggling weapons, or deserved to go.” We alsomake excuses for the death of civilians. Slowly we are made to acceptmore deaths and killings to deal with our problems. . .we lose a little ofourselves when we do this. Soon a war will break out and retaliationswill begin. I don’t want to be a part of this; I don’t want to accept politicalassassinations as a tool. (Fieldnotes, June 2007)


Dima was struggling against becoming jaded and dismissing the assassinations asnormal. Yet this was simply part of our long, ongoing debate about the moral im-plications, the meaning, and the role of our mundane actions in such times. Thedebates remained largely unresolved, and Dima, like myself, continued about herdays teaching, working, and frequenting local coffee shops, as the violence of Nahrel-bared was ultimately far enough from both our daily lives. The caveat remains,however, that forms of violence would surreptitiously return in the way we experi-enced the ordinary and what it made us think about, remember, and discuss.10 In thisway, the ordinary in violence was used as a tactic to bring back violence into theordinary on more manageable terms, and so that the violence would not appear as arupture.

Sensing The Unsensed

The problem with a discussion around the anticipation of violence is that it is unseenand unsensed until it is identified, either by being voiced or consciously thought about.This led me to observe a contradiction that surrounded the indiscriminate bombingsin 2007. On the one hand, people spoke about the bombings in a nonchalant manner.They would say things like “Not again!” or “Good, now we can go out becausetoday’s bombing went off already,” or they would barely flinch and just go on aboutwhat they were doing in the moment. On the other hand, I would find far fewerpeople on the streets, like in the days after the assassination of former Member ofParliament Walid Eido on June 13, 2007. People talked of how life goes on, but manytended to stay home, checking on a lonely family member or an aging grandmother,or going to the homes of friends and family to take comfort in the sharing of politicaland situational analysis. They acted as though they did not care and that life will goon, but for the few days after a bombing, this nonchalant attitude did not translate inpeople’s behaviors in moving around the city.

In these moments, deserted rather than inhabited space becomes a trope to thinkthrough. De Certeau (1984) thought of place as being the consumption of space toproduce something that is determined by “its ways of use.” Thus, depending on howspace is inhabited, we get a certain type of place. But what about deserted space?What kind of place is produced when the space is not being inhabited or used?Perhaps desertion itself, emptiness, the decision not to inhabit a space, is a type ofconsumption.

What I observed in the days during and after the indiscriminate and frequent bombingsthroughout 2007, was that Beirut residents determined the production of their city’sspace by deserting the city streets. People projected fear and tension onto places,and these places became inhabited by memories instead of by city dwellers, and bya nostalgia of the hustle and bustle of what once was: “dı ↪ana Beyrut” (Pity Beirut,it is lost), people would say. Places were emptied, and emptiness began to takeon its own meaning of loss, of potential, of a dark anticipation for the next bomb.Through this meaning, a newly inhabited place was arising out of spaces of emptiness,and it was this, I suggest, that the rare passerby sensed rather than the emptiness,per se.


City streets are often a reflection of the social world and can tell us much aboutsociety. Traveling the city streets of Beirut in those days after the various bombings,specifically in 2007, I found emptiness to be a grotesque allegory for political vi-olence. In this emptiness I saw the way fear played out; I saw the deterioration ofsocial interaction; and I saw how simultaneously laughter, a spirit of carefreenessand cynicism, that one witnessed in the private spaces of people’s homes could existalongside this emptiness. The hollowed streets, rather than exposing some profoundsense of violence and reality otherwise masked by laughter and cynicism, should beseen as a lens that, along with these other expressions, can reveal the contradictions,ambiguities, and negotiations people feel in such precarious times.

As I stood in the empty streets of Hamra on June 14, the day after Eido’s assassination,which killed several pedestrians, I thought of how this, alongside the private conver-sations mixed with laughter, was telling of what this society was feeling and thinking.Amid the desertedness, I could sense the fear, tension, and confusion. I could sensethe want to immigrate, the anticipation of worse to come, and the preparation for war;I could sense all those things that I often missed in conversations with people when intheir homes, where they played their political games to highlight or deemphasize theviolence and thus attempt to subvert it. More specifically, I could sense these thingsin what I heard people tell me; in Dima’s expressions of frustration, Ahmed’s talk ofwar, Rola’s anxiety over her kids, and in people’s repetition about their feelings oftension and their decisions to stay home or where to park their car.

Two days after the assassination, I was at Rola’s home engaged in a political conver-sation with some relatives, jokingly commenting on how it was easier to maneuverthrough the barren streets that were now wider because security concerns made it socars could not park on either side. Relatives laughed and agreed, after which some-one responded by dismissing the violence with a quote from Saint Paul on how “allthings together work for good.” I suggest that such conversations and interactions,filled with jokes and laughter, in the aftermath of violence allow for a negotiation andambiguous space to exist alongside the fear, tension, silence, solitude, and despair. Inbetween the streets and those private spaces, one is able to perhaps listen to societytelling us what it collectively feels.

But then, as time passed and the bombings became less frequent or appeared to cease,space and time changed; they reverted to the way they were before the bombings. Thestreets were no longer empty. They became inhabited with people again, the highwayscrowded at night, and through this habitation, we see what is often thought to be socialresilience. I try to think back to the steady, gradual shift to the way things were, but itis too gradual for even the anthropological lens. The empty and the inhabited mergeinto one, a continuous transition that appears as two states of affair only because weare unable to observe the continuous durational shift occurring within these statesthemselves (Bergson 1960:3). The crowd incorporates the violent acts as part of dailylife, and they become normalized. Certainty syncretizes with uncertainty, and peopledraw a sense of security from this and from forms of anticipation they know and haveinternalized. People start to go out more and they begin to fear less as time goes by;life, as they say, moves on.


While I was sensing things by being attentive to people’s conversations and theirexperiences around the city (and country), in all these times and spaces of anticipation,it continued to intrigue me to think of how people were themselves clearly sensingwhat was physically unsensed, namely, future forms of violence and war, and howopinions and decisions were based on such senses. Jana, whom I had made friendswith immediately after the July 2006 war, captured the nuances of these senses ina conversation we had one afternoon at De Prague, a cafe in the neighborhood ofHamra. Jana was in her thirties at the time of this writing, an artist, and not affiliatedwith any political party. In my eyes, she was elegant, passionate, and cool, but hightempered when unjustly crossed. She grew up in a religiously mixed home and livedin Lebanon all her life until she moved overseas for some years to complete a graduatedegree and to take various jobs. She experienced the entire period of the war in the’70s and ’80s before leaving in the early ’90s.

Sitting on a semicomfortable blue couch, sipping cappuccino, Jana complained aboutthe cafe smoke and I about my legs uncomfortably hitting against the low tabletops.She talked to me about how she felt that we sense war through our memories of a pastwar, and that she has dreams of this—not necessarily nightmares, just war-relateddreams. She is not alone in having these dreams. I have heard this before. I interrupther to ask how is it that we sense something that is not there? How do we sensesomething abstract? What does it mean to be constantly sensing a future war? Sinceit was mid-June 2007, and the war in Nahr el-Bared was raging, I told her abouthow I noticed Palestinians sensing an impending massacre. I told her how I noticedthem anticipating yet another mass migration. I gathered this from discussions withthem, and that they based this anticipation on the civil war and on their memories ofhorrors like the 1982 massacre of Palestinians by the Lebanese right-wing ChristianPhalange Party in Sabra and Chatilla. I remarked that they fear this even though theconditions today are different.

Jana questioned this difference and pushed me to see sameness and continuity betweenour present and past. “The civil war did not end,” she says, “the story continues. Whenyou watch documentaries of the war, like on Al-Jazeera [TV], or think back to thewar, the conclusion is that it is ‘to be continued’; that the story was not over but thatwe are continuing with another chapter.” Her point is that the players are the samebut just some years older. If this is the case, if the faces and players are the same,Jana persisted, then that makes the Palestinians sense the future based on clear linksto the past. She claimed that the past is very much a present reality; it does not escapeus and it is not merely a thread that connects us, but the very reality of the past thatwe are currently living. Even when there is no talk of war, she sensed it in what sheread and watched on the news, or in seeing the same old faces of warlords in themedia.

Not everyone thinks like Jana; the point is that people feel the heightened antici-pation and sense war because it speaks to an overall meaning-making of the socialworld around them. This can lead one to consider the anticipation of violence as anintersubjective moment. Through it, people in Lebanon form their relationships totheir surrounding community, to the grocer or to representatives of political parties,


for example. Through it, they also form a present that is based on entrenched pastantagonisms—those that carry on from Lebanon’s war—that then guides them into afuture that is stirred by uncertainty.

Conclusion

People in Lebanon are constantly inundated by a discourse that claims a war is goingto be waged soon, and like Ahmed at the beginning of this article, they often speculateand ask each other when the war might begin. They have certain imaginations of whatthis war will look like and who its actors will be, often that it is going to be an internalwar or that Israel is going to attack, but rarely do their speculations have definedcontours. Whether they believe in the coming war or not, they cannot help but thinkor wonder about it. The practices that are informed by this constant thinking of futurewar, by this anticipation of violence, give another dimension to life in and around warthat reveals the subtleties of this life and its ability to take the war and its discourseand to make it other than itself. In the midst of physical perpetration of violence,practices of anticipation might mean playing cards in a shelter or listening to musicor enjoying the company of friends. Between the physicality of war’s violence andthe period I have been concerned with, this might mean a conversation with a waiteron moving to Dubai, a mother’s warning to a child, or a neighbor’s advice on housingmatters. These cases highlight a different picture of people’s lives in zones of conflict,despite war’s enormous, spectacular, and expansionist power to produce itself in itstimeless image; an image of destruction, victimization, and suffering.

Time has been crucial to my argument, especially as an understanding of time asfluid, not cyclical nor linear. Anticipation, as I have claimed, works from a presentto fold the past into the future. It is in this way that I maintain that the anticipation ofviolence acts as a form of memory, reminding people in Lebanon that the war is notover and that struggles for a better world continue.

My argument is that the anticipation of violence is a way to confront and use ordinaryeveryday life, fusing certainty with uncertainty, informing the way we traverse themundane and the way we conceive intersubjective relationships within it. Thus,instead of walking along the Beirut corniche (waterfront) watching the sunset andskipping rocks, or going on a picnic, or hanging out with friends at a cafe; insteadof all these acts of everyday life being rather mundane, all it takes is a moment’sreflection to see how these incidents can often become politically reconstituted andreused as acts of resistance, indifference, despair, hope, or survival. It is not war that istotal or ever-present here. However, forms of political violence surely seep, at certainpoints in time, into the various activities, spaces, and moments of everyday life.

Anticipation causes us to remember, and in the context of Lebanon it causes usto fold violence into aspects of daily life. Walking on the corniche one can seehow the ordinary, always interacting with the surrounding context of the moment,becomes inflected with forms of violence through anticipation. It is this anticipationof violence, however, which can act as a condition of possibility for change orsquandered, as it often is, into despair.


Notes

I would like to thank Diala Hawi, Noora Kassem, Toby Kelly, Michelle Obeid,Mark Westmoreland, and the anonymous reviewers of PoLar for their invaluablecomments on drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the Centre forLebanese Studies, Oxford University, for funding the process of writing. Apprecia-tion also goes to all who assisted me on my dissertation from which this article wasadapted.

1. Dialogue presented in this article was originally conveyed in Arabic or a mix ofArabic and English. All translations are mine.

2. All names of people in this article are pseudonyms to protect people’s identity.3. Lebanon has experienced high rates of emigration over the last 150 years. Be-

tween 1975–90, around 40 percent of the population emigrated due to politi-cal instability. One survey suggests that in 2008 approximately 67 percent ofLebanese expressed an intention to emigrate (Tabar 2009).

4. The battles in May 2008 were fought primarily by two groups. The first consistedof Hizballah, the Shi’a Amal Movement (led by Nabih Berri, current Speakerof Parliament), and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The second group wasSaed Hariri’s Future Movement and Walid Jumblat’s Socialist Party. The firstgroup belonged to the March 8 coalition, while the latter belonged to the March14 coalition. These coalitions were formed in 2005, following the assassinationof PM Rafiq Hariri, and were named after million-people demonstrations wereheld on those dates. The March 8 coalition was against the internationalizationof a tribunal investigating Hariri’s assassination, while the March 14 coalitionwas in favor of this tribunal and for disarming Hizballah.

5. See BBC Arabic February 10, 2008 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/middle_east_news/newsid_7237000/7237892.stm, accessed August 14, 2012.

6. The FPM is officially secular though it is perceived as a predominantly Christianparty. It is led by former commander of the Lebanese army, General MichelAoun, and is allied with Hizballah.

7. Suleiman Franjieh is leader of the Marada Party, a largely communal-basedpolitical party that draws support from Christians in North Lebanon, specificallyin Zghorta.

8. This understanding of the divisions between war and peace, or not-war, followsPaul Richards’s (2005) call to think of these periods as a continuum, where hewrites of war as being “long periods of (uneasy) peace interrupted by occasionaleruptions of violence” (5). He quotes Aretxaga, who wrote, “Peace and war arenot so much two opposed states of being as they are multi-faceted, ambiguous,mutually imbricated areas of struggle” (5).

9. Most refugees fled to the Baddawi refugee camp because it was closest to theNahr el-bared camp out of all the other 12 remaining Palestinian refugee campsin Lebanon.

10. Das (2007) tackles similar issues by exploring the way violence continues toreappear in the present through language and what is heard and unheard, saidand unsaid.


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“The War is Going to Ignite”: On the Anticipation of Violence in Lebanon

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